Week of November 21, 2022
Happy Thanksgiving.
During the sixty minutes my endodontist needed to perform a root canal last week, I could not use my phone. The resultant dopamine withdrawal primed by the variable reward system of email and texts was intense (thank you, B.F. Skinner). De-phoned, I was initially comforted by the generous amounts of Fleetwood Mac interspersed amongst the dental office's 70s and 80s background music. But, with the rubber mouth dam clipped to my gums, bright lights, and four hands in my face, I kept thinking about the Pavlovian conditioning from A Clockwork Orange. Unfortunately, I now associate Stevie Nicks singing Gypsy with the sound of a dental drill.
There is a surprisingly large number of hyper-specific studies on the use of music during dental procedures. For instance:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31884075/
Dopamine is a powerful drug, and social media knows it:
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/
Pavlovian (Classical) conditioning in A Clockwork Orange:
https://tommennaindustries.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/stanley-kubricks-a-clockwork-orange-an-analysis-of-conditioning/
P.S. I am fine (minus my newfound dislike of Gypsy), and the procedure was essentially painless.
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In the U.S., case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths are stable. These data are a (falsely?) comforting signal going into a week of travel and family gatherings. (Remember - without good data on cases from testing, there is a time lag to observe a new surge). Post-Thanksgiving (and Christmas) hospitalization data may clarify if we have genuinely reached some community-wide immune protection threshold. But flu, RSV, and COVID are out there and infecting people. PLEASE employ a layered strategy - get vaccinated with the new booster for covid and flu, put on a mask in densely populated places (like on a plane), and ensure good air exchange/filtration in your houses.
N.Y. Times Tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Financial Times Data
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=e92000001&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2021-09-01&values=deaths
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Wastewater tracking in Ontario is tracking with the data from the NYT - that case rates are stable.
https://twitter.com/Billius27/status/1593671628331880452
San Diego's wastewater appears to be seeing a spike in cases
https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1593798922442797056
Consistent with data from last week's NEJM article on the impact of masking in schools, data from Quebec indicate that children under nine are experiencing rising hospitalization rates. A loyal reader pointed me to journalist Aaron Derfel's thread. (I suspect) these data reflect the realities of lower vaccination rates (in this age group), limited masking in schools (and elsewhere), and lack of attention to good air filtration in many environments.
https://twitter.com/aaron_derfel/status/1593813120807567361
How to take action on the messy COVID data is still challenging. Two newsletter issues I found add some clarity on how to navigate all this:
Dr. Eric Topol on the Omicron BQ.1.1 variant's immune escape and why we do not see a surge in hospitalizations:
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-bq11-variant-story
Dr. Jeremy Faust interviews epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina on the metrics of when we can say the pandemic is over and what to do for now.
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/how-will-we-know-when-the-pandemic?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I'll finish the infectious disease topics with a Huffington Post article that offers some guidance based on symptoms - "COVID, Flu Or RSV? Here's How To Tell The Difference."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/covid-flu-rsv-symptoms_l_636c0ddbe4b01727bbd44f18
Medical Trends and Technology
Dr. Avraham Cooper offered a Tweetorial on the physiology of muscle growth due to resistance training. There are numerous links to data and other resources. The short answer is "swelling and repair = ripped muscles."
https://twitter.com/avrahamcoopermd/status/1345753985467224064?s=42&t=GG3t2L1CcP5w-_LGupwjWg
Related - exercise is good for everyone - including cancer patients.
"Exercise can improve outcomes for colon cancer patients."
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/11/18/exercise-colon-cancer-obesity/6831668711148/
Infographics
Pushing the boundaries of infographics, but I am fascinated by how many people have spent effort mapping out the ways one might sleep in a bed with a centaur. A director of cinematography at Disney (Joaquin Baldwin) started the thread, but he is not alone in his thoughts on the practical problems mythical creatures face.
https://twitter.com/joabaldwin/status/1593265509796978690
Topics from the newsletter through the "eyes" of our A.I. Overlords!
(What is this section? - https://openai.com/dall-e-2/)
"Painting of a centaur in a dental chair lifting weights"
https://labs.openai.com/s/GWRJZmu1jW3FyBe6VMrA6vvV
Things I learned this week
In 2017, a linguist at the University of York undertook efforts to identify out-of-use English words and phrases. I vote for re-introducing "ear rent," or maybe something like "brain rent."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41266000
and
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-english-words'
Eels may have played a role in the history of Thanksgiving. Of course, you would expect to find this kind of story in the 2021 "Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World." Even if you do not share "an enduring fascination with eels" nor find them to be "nature's most mysterious creature," you will undoubtedly want to consider adding them to your Thanksgiving feast after reading this story:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/11/20/eel-squanto-thanksgiving/
and
Surprisingly, after reading the book description and comments, I learned that eels might, in fact, be as fascinating and mysterious as advertised.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51938590-the-book-of-eels
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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